Sustenance.

Fragile.

I am buoyed up by hope.

The truth is that most of the time, the hope that moves through me toward life with arms wide open is small, particular and very hooman. I have hope that someday I'll feel the delcious excitement of being loved and being completely fallen in love, I have hope that the bones I broke last week will mend quickly and that the grazes on my face will heal, I will learn to roller skate gracefully, and I will be kissed everyday by a man who takes my breath away. I have hope that I will find the time today to step onto my mat and practice some yoga.

There is ofcourse, a risk in focussing on what we hope for - we can fall into the daydream, missing what we have. But our ability to imagine, to anticipate, is part of what makes us hooman. Anyone who has ever made love knows that part of the pleasure is in anticipating both the familiar and the unknown. The pleasure and intimacy of lovemaking are deepened when I am able to slow down and consciously savour the sharp taste of the moment in between, the second just before, the place where breath catches in anticipation. I am aware of the scent of heat held in the air between two mouths reaching for one another hungrily. There is hope that sustains, that moves me towards life, in the skin that tingles, waiting, fine haris at attention, reaching. There is anticipation in the places not yet touched. There is hope of being fully met by the one who can touch me without taking his eyes from mine.

Hoping and anticipating can deepen our experience of the moment, motivate us to act or sit still.

And sometimes, there is no hope. When hope is gone, I can breathe into my heart and try to find an anchor that sustains me, an anchor that is fueled by the moments when I or others are able to find what is good, what is funny, sweet and tender in life, despite deep wounds and overwhelming difficulties. It is the courage of the hooman spirit and the relentless persistence of life all around us that give me that anchor point. Life will continue, and it will conspire with its beauty to pull me back to hope.

And sometimes, neither hope nor that anchor can find me, and there is nothing to hang onto. When that happens, the late-night hours are the worst. I read my kindle, work on my laptop, clean the house, wanting to exhaust myself so that when I stop I wall fall into a dreamless sleep, bypassing the ache that leaves me staring blindly into the darkness.

In those moments, all that buoyed me up in more helpful times, seems colourless, flat, not worth the trouble. Food loses taste, if I can be bothered to eat. I take no pleasure in the outdoors. And I long to disappear. I have to say, the times without an anchor and without hope are often brought on by loss, when loved ones' lives are teetering or they die, friends become sick, sanctuaries in the wildness we once knew and called our own become devasted. When things like that happen, I do what most people would, do what needs to be done. In many ways, it is not the time of crisis that is hardest to bear. I have learned how to be with grief of another, and my own, how to gather strength to pack boxes, paint walls, and repitch wind-torn tents. But later, when the crises were past, when there was nothing left to be done, I found myself sitting on my bed unable to sleep. After a long time, only two lines flowed from my pen onto the blank page of my diarty. It was only as I read those lines that I realised how far I had wandered from hope:

Too late, alone in my bed, I whispered slowly into the darkness,

"I am not as tough as I look. I am not indestructible."

Something inside me had closed.

When what we rely on falls away, there is nothing we can do but wait without hope, without an anchor. How we wait - whether we close up or remain open - is the choice we have to make. To choose life, we have to be willing to wait, open to life and love at a time when opening seems impossible and we are sure that no one and nothing will ever be able to find us. What sustains us when all else falls away are the practices that make waiting and staying open to life possible. I have been lucky to find three such things in my life: yoga & meditation, writing and spending time close to nature. These things enrich my life when I have hope, and they give me a way to bear the waiting. What makes them practices is that I do them regularly, whether I feel like it or not. A practice of any kind is best cultivated in times when things are going well, so that in harder times it is there for us as an anchor point.

I want to know, can you love life, and let love find you when you are lost? What sustains you, what helps you sit without hope and wait, opening your heart to love when you have no faith that love even exists? My practices are simply ways of picking up my end of the thread that links me to love and life, even when I have no hope, or faith, that the other end of the thread is connected. And every time - every single time - I am met with a touch, a warmth, a word, an action, that brings me back to life, and hope.

The thing is, this wonderful sense of hope, we only have to give and recieve what we are able. There is zero risk. The intimacy, the interconnectedness of all life that is the love to which we all belong can only be given and received. It cannot be taken.

And when it is given and received, we are sustained.